Uppingham by the Sea eBook

It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow
of this resolve the owners of so many good houses,
fields, and gardens, all the outward and visible of
Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable
limit, landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster
almost as much disburdened of his titular realm as
if he were a bishop in partibus or the chief
of a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but
those who submitted to it breathed the freer at having
broken prison, and felt something, not indeed of the
recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation
which sustains it:

Why now, blow wind, swell billow,
and swim bark;
The storm is up, and all is on the
hazard!

There was cited at this time a somewhat similar event
in the history of Rugby School. Dr. Arnold,
in a like emergency, had removed the school, or all
who chose to go, in numerous detachments under the
care severally of himself and others of his masters
to various distant spots, among others his own house
in the Lake country, where they spent some two months,
and returned to Rugby when the danger was over.
It was felt, however, that this incident furnished
no real precedent for the present venture. What
we were proposing was not to arrange a number of independent
reading-parties in scattered country retreats.
Such a plan would hardly have been practicable with
a system in which, as in our case, the division of
the school for teaching purposes has no reference
to the division into boarding-houses. It was
proposed to pluck up the school by the roots and transplant
it bodily to strange soil; to take with us the entire
body of masters, with, probably, their families, and
every boy who was ready to follow; to provide teaching
for the latter, not only without loss in the amount,
but without interruption of the existing system in
any branch; and to guarantee the supply of everything
necessary for the corporate life of three hundred boys,
who had to be housed, fed, taught, disciplined, and
(not the easiest of tasks) amused, on a single spot,
and one as bare of all the wonted appliances of public
school life as that yet uncertain place was like to
prove, of which the recommendation for our residence
would be that no one else cared to reside there.

The Trustees of the School met at Uppingham on March
11th. This was the earliest opportunity of consulting
them collectively on the resolution to break up the
school and to migrate, which had been taken on the
7th. They sanctioned the breaking up of the
school. On the question of its removal elsewhere
they recorded no opinion.